New free network services

To recap: In March 2008, some of our associate members met up during
our conference and spoke about what free network services would look
like. They came up with a document for discussion, the Franklin Street
Statement, named after the street address of the FSF offices, here in Boston.

Since then, a number of free network services have
arrived. Previously, we spoke about Identi.ca. The founder of
Identi.ca, Evan Prodromou, came to Boston for our LibrePlanet 2009
conference and spoke about some of the challenges in building the
system. Here's an update on a few more services that have sprung up
since then:

Libre.fm: Spurred on by a discussion at the
conference, I and a few other free software hackers have been
working on a free software replacement for another of these Web 2.0
sites. Libre.fm, a free software replacement for the music site
Last.fm, was born at the very end of March 2009. In the last two
months, we've provided a scraping tool for users to get their data out
of Last.fm, as well as replacements for both the server and Web
components. At the time of writing, Libre.fm has just under 9 million
tracks in its database, of which approximiately 1.5 million
are unique. All this, from just under 11,000 users in a little
over 8 weeks.

Identi.ca: After continuing success with Identi.ca, Evan has raised
funding for the project and has hired some developers to work on the
service.

Filmaster: Filmaster is a new social network for movie fans
featuring personalized content and recommendations. Filmaster allows
you to run your own movie blog, rate movies and talk about movies with
people whose opinions you care about. They've created a place for real movie
freaks -- people for whom film is not just entertainment.

We hope to have a full interview with the developers of Filmaster in
the next issue of the Bulletin.